


Hello, it's Me

by juxtapose



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Series, The X-Files Revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 23:16:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5068672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juxtapose/pseuds/juxtapose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a year, Scully goes home. It's a little different than she remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hello, it's Me

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: My God. I've returned from beyond the grave and it's to write about the two worst FBI agents ever. What has the world come to? This summer I (binge) watched The X-Files, and I'm a better Sci Fi fan for it!
> 
> This fic addresses a few components, namely:  
> 1\. The fact that Mulder and Scully are supposedly broken up at the start of Season 10  
> 2\. Chris Carter's assertion that Scully left Mulder "because" of his depression. As someone with depression, I feel like that just...wouldn't happen. At least not in such simple terms. So I like to think this oneshot fleshes that out a bit.  
> 3\. The fact that Adele's "Hello" took the Internet by storm yesterday, and caused MSR fans to freak out with how relatable it is to post-series Mulder & Scully.
> 
> Anyway. Obviously this is my first trek into TXF fandom, so I'm a bit nervous. I hope I did the characters and their dynamic justice. Also, I just had a gut feeling M&S would've relocated to a quiet spot in the northeast post-IWTB, but that's just my headcanon. I'd also say this takes place 5 yrs after IWTB, but a little over a year before the revival.
> 
> Many thanks to Maddie and Alec on Twitter for reading this over for me! <3
> 
> DISCLAIMER: I own nothing. When do I ever?

SAVED VOICEMAIL, WEDNESDAY APRIL 23, 2014

“Hello…? Scully? It’s me, uh. It’s late. You’re probably asleep. And I know we said we’d only call for emergencies. But I just. [ _pause_ ] This week I was working on a case in Denver—ectoplasmic residue all over this guy’s house, dripping with the stuff, and I’m thinking it’s what remains of the victims of a house fire before the place was rebuilt—but um, that’s not important. Anyway. Remember you and I took on that case in Colorado? I think it was a couple of years after we met. And you couldn’t sleep. And I never slept anyway, you know me. So I saw you outside my motel window, staring up at the moon. It was a half-moon that night. And you were looking at it—just looking, thinking, probably. I don’t know if you knew I was watching you. But you looked really…peaceful, I guess. I don’t know what made me think of that, but. I wish. I wish you could’ve kept that. The contentedness. And I. I wish I hadn’t been a part of what took it away from you. Um. [ _sniff_ ] Anyway. I haven’t heard from you and I guess that’s a good thing. But I hope you’re okay. You know where to find me.”

END OF MESSAGE. TO REPLAY, PRESS 1. TO DELETE, PRESS 7…

[][][]

            This isn’t any of my business, she thought as she felt the lock turn. Her subsequent thought upon opening the creaking door was, it’s too clean in here.

            Dana Scully stood in the doorway of Fox Mulder’s small dwellings in woodsy Maine. Her heart sank into her stomach. The last time she’d done this, it was to enter a home they both shared. This place--with carefully dusted furniture and a rhythmic, ticking living-room clock, felt almost sterile. She remembered her dad once saying that you could tell a lot about a person by the home they kept.

            “Mulder?” she called, though she knew he wasn’t home. His car wasn’t in the driveway.

            Idly, as she walked through the sitting room and the kitchen, she recalled the last time Mulder’s home had felt unlived in--when he’d been abducted; when she’d lost him, and she spent half her nights curled up in his ruffled sheets praying for his return. How young and terrified they’d been back then. How afraid they both had been of the concept of a home, comprised not only of plastered walls but a shared consciousness, beating steady and alive, between two people. But when they finally made it, their home had been just that; theirs. Made from their basest selves, their firmest understanding of one another, in this small house outside Portland. It was the kind her grandparents’ friends might have had when they were starting out, with a small fireplace and old-fashioned candles in the window at night.

            The last time she’d come here, it was to collect her belongings.

            (“Let’s go to Portland,” he’d said, out of the blue, on the flight back from their vacation.

            “...What?”

            “Remember you tried to vacation in Maine once but ended up frying a demonically possessed doll in a microwave? Let’s go to Maine. It’s nice there.” He’d met her eyes, then, and added, “Quiet.”

            And quiet was what she wanted. Quiet and Mulder and just...being. He’d understood that.

            So that was how they’d ended up in northern New England in the fall of 2009. They had a quintessential first winter together--he nearly broke his back trying to shovel them out of the snow in their front yard. They built a snowman to look like Walter Skinner [and sent him a picture]. Scully hadn’t felt so much like a child, or so blissfully, ridiculously happy, for as long as she could remember. And for a while, the darkness couldn’t catch up to them.

            Until it did.)

            The master bedroom was pristine. Bedclothes folded neatly, quilt perched at the end of the mattress.  Scully remembered long nights in this room. Whispering. Touching. Screaming. Fucking. Fighting. Loving. All on unkempt sheets in a room she insisted he never did enough of his part keeping clean. It drove her crazy. He drove her crazy.

            Her stomach lurched as she flipped the light switch in the white-bright washroom. A lone toothbrush, toothpaste, a folded face towel. She found herself staring at her reflection in the mirror, imagining his behind her, the way he used to wrap his arms around her and watch as she did mundane things, like brush her teeth or fix her hair.

            Scully looked down. There was blood in the sink, which caught her panicked glance immediately. Deep, deep red against alabaster ceramic. Red and white and red and white. It reminded her of the dye he’d swirled into that frosting he made for her birthday cake one year. One of the rare times in which he _remembered_ her birthday at all. The cake had tasted awful, but she ate it anyway. As a joke, he’d poorly outlined the Apollo 11 insignia in icing. She’d smeared some on his nose.

            Little crimson droplets. He always cut himself when he shaved. She used to have to do it for him sometimes, especially after a night of terrors, when he was too exhausted and red-eyed to hold the razor steady.

            She opened the overhead cabinet. A bottle of venlafaxine--200 mg capsules--tipped on its side. The prescription date read 13 MARCH 2013. Two weeks after she’d left, or thereabouts. Next to it, a more recent 60 mg dose of fluoxetine. He couldn’t be taking both of them. Perhaps he was taking neither.

            (“They make me all hazy, Scully. The pills. I can’t _focus_ on this--”

            “Mulder, there’s nothing to focus _on_!” She’d spun around to face him in the sharp light of their bedroom. “That cigarette-smoking bastard was _wrong_. We made it through---through 2012 and whatever it was _supposed_ to bring with it--and we’ll make it through this, too.”

            “I’m not convinced. There’s always more to uncover. You should know that, of all people. I can’t give up now. I’m not a wanted man anymore, Scully. This is my chance to keep fighting!” He was fire ignited in the brightness of the room, and it was too, too bright.

            “No one’s telling you to give up.” She’d reached up, brushed her fingers against the dissonance of his face. He’d been growing a beard again. “But the past is over, Mulder. We have to move on. _You_ have to move on. All of this--getting looped back into the cases the FBI needs you to solve--it’s killing you all over again. I can’t watch that happen.”

            A bitter laugh, followed by his simple solution: “Then don’t. Stop playing the doctor, Scully. You can’t fix me. You can’t fix this. And you can’t hide from it.”)

            By the time she made her way back to the front room, she was spent. She sunk into the couch (the one they used to sometimes watch _Godzilla_ movies on, sometimes have sex on, sometimes eat breakfast for dinner on, the one on which Mulder would rest his head in Scully’s lap as she tried to gently pry from him the bitter memories cutting through his brain that made him go very, very quiet at night). Took out her phone from her coat pocket, navigated to her saved voicemails.

            Leaning back, she closed her eyes.

            “Hello,” was his voice on the other line, tinny and distant, “Scully. It’s me.”

            Six saved messages, all beginning with the same three words. She’d saved them over the course of several months. Sometimes he was drunk, other times scared, once softspoken and honest and calling “just because.” What each recording had in common was the little fracture in his voice as he spoke. The slight tremor that broke his syllables as he slurred or shook out her name. “I’m sorry,” he’d say, or “I love you,” or “I miss you. I miss you, I miss you...”

            Dana Scully did not know why she was here. This was not her home anymore. It had not been her home for many months. The last time she had seen Fox Mulder, it had been from her rear view mirror as she drove away from this place. His expression--shattered, silent, resigned--was the last memory she’d captured of him.

            She sat there, in what was supposed to have been their new start, their forever. Tears she’d kept behind her throat for over a year came stumbling down her face, and she held her cell phone to her ear with trembling fingers, listening to the ups and downs of his speech over and over. She recalled their last conversation. Piercing hollers followed by quieter, somber syllables which were almost worse—words comprised of regret, of unmasked grief for what had been and what neither of them could have.

(MulderdontmakemedothisMulderpleaseMulderletmehelpyouMulderstopMulderMulderMULDER GOODBYE)

            And then, his voice. Ringing not through the speakers of her phone, but through the room, with a slight echo:

            “Scully.”

            She jumped, her phone clattering to the floor. Wiping her eyes in a poor attempt to save face, she stood up. Mulder had an overnight bag slung over his shoulder. He didn’t seem as tall as the last time she saw him, as if these last months had been weighted belts crunching on his spine.

            He dropped the bag to the floor and stuffed his hands in his jean pockets.

            “Um.” She leaned down to pick up her phone. “Mulder. I-I was just--”

            “I figured it was you,” he interrupted, half a smile always on the verge of coming through, a cluster of stars obscured behind clouds. “Well. Hoped it was you. Based on the people who typically break into my house, it would either be the redhead or the chain-smoker. And I didn’t smell cigarettes. Nice new car, by the way.”

            She wanted to laugh. If this was five years ago, she’d have laughed. Instead, she reached into her pocket and retrieved the spare key she’d used to get into the house, waving it in front of him. “I read in a magazine you should change where you keep your spare every three months. Family safety, and all that.”

            “Well. I’m not exactly the poster child for _Family Circle_.” He shrugged, and for a moment he sounded like the man she’d met in that basement two decades ago--glowing eyes, an understated wittiness about him. “Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you. Was helping with a case down in Boston.”

            She took a good look at him, dared to let her eyes trail him up and down. He looked tired as ever. It wasn’t likely that he slept any more than he had when they shared a bed. His clothes, as always, fit him slightly too large. He probably smelled the same—musty, homey. She wanted to test that by folding herself into him, but she clasped her hands behind her back and averted his eyes instead.

            Then came the dreaded question: “What are you doing here?” It wasn’t accusatory, but Scully felt she had to explain herself all the same.

             “I just, um.” She looked up again, stammered, faltered. He always managed to make her logic, her reason, the poise with she presented herself crumble. “I guess I just came to check on you. See if you’re...” _Okay_? _Of course he’s not okay. He’s so far from okay that he made you leave so he wouldn’t hurt you._

             She trailed off. He tilted his head, appraising her, and God only knew what he was seeing—the person who’d left him behind last year, after everything they both had seen and experienced, standing in his living room with water-stained eyes.

             Scully sucked in a breath. “I know. I shouldn’t have come. We talked about space and boundaries and--”

             “Scully.” He cut her off, expression open, vulnerable. Something she never was until she met him. “Have you gotten my messages?”

             Scully gulped back the lump in her throat, attempting to keep her voice from wavering. “Yes.”

             He nodded, shuffling from foot to foot for a moment before taking a couple of steps forward. Closer to her. “We did talk about boundaries,” he agreed. “But I wanted you to know. I…I think about you. All the time. I know it’s been a year. I also know you’re doing great work at the Children’s Hospital.

             “You have your life, now, Scully, and that’s…that’s what we both wanted, isn’t it? But sometimes I. I have to call because I also know that you…” He sighed, staring down at his sneakers. “You are the one thing, through all of this—through all these years, that kept the world—my world—from falling completely apart.” He shook his head. “I know that’s…a lot. On one person. And now that I’ve had time I…I understand. I do. I…I think it’s better we’re apart, and if you want me to stop calling, I--”

              “Mulder.” It was her turn to interrupt. “I was with you through all of it, you know. Not behind you, or forging a path in front of you. I was _with_ you. And if you hadn’t been there to keep me sane, I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

            Suddenly, she knew why she was here. She understood what had been left unfinished, what had infiltrated her motivations to drive all the way here from her nice, peaceful apartment in New Hampshire where the darkness couldn’t find her anymore.

            “I needed you to—I need you to know.” The tears were falling again, out of her control. She reached up, running a hand through the wisps of his hair. “No matter how different things are now. My feelings for you will never change, Mulder. Not ever.” Her words trembled and she could feel bones shaking in time with them. “You were never alone in this.” 

            And now he knew.

            He took her hand, lowered it to his chest. His heartbeat was steady. As paired words in a story or pieces of an elaborate puzzle, they fit together as always—she burying her face into the crook of his neck, his arms sliding around her. They stood in their once-home, Mulder pressing a kiss to the top of Scully’s head as her hot tears stained his shirt.

            “I shouldn’t have pushed you out,” he murmured into her hair.

            She replied, muffled into his shirt: “I shouldn’t have walked away.”

            Silence stood between them for several moments, an acknowledgement of their mutual understanding of what went wrong, of what will always go wrong, and even of everything they’d done right by each other. The constants and the inconsistencies.

            They did not move for some time. Scully found she didn’t want to. She wasn’t sure what that meant for her, or for them, but even in this strange place she no longer recognized, the sensation of his arms around her was familiarity enough.

            She could feel the gentle touch of his hands running up and down her back, soothing. “What if you didn’t walk away? For now.” He added when he sensed her tense up in his embrace. “Stay the night? You’ve got a long drive.”

            Scully looked up at him. There were tired bags under his eyes. There were spaces on the planes of his skin where laugh lines should be, that weren’t. She could not fix these things for him. She could not change the wreckage of his past, nor could he go back and retrieve everything she had lost. But perhaps, given enough time and patience, they could take those demons and—without forgetting them—move away from them together toward something better.

             “Okay,” she said. He took both her hands. Squeezed them.

             It wasn’t home anymore.

             But it was a quiet house in Maine, and there was Mulder, holding her steady.

             Perhaps it was a start.

 

_Hello, it’s me._

_I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet to go over everything._

_They say that time’s supposed to heal you, but I ain’t done much healing…_

_Hello from the other side. I must’ve called a thousand times_

_to tell you I’m sorry for everything that I’ve done._  
  
\-- Adele, “Hello”


End file.
